Published by Note Note Éditions, Folio takes us back to the decade that saw Viviane Sassen’s emergence as a photographer: the 1990s.
The images of Folio were taken in the mid-1990s, just when Viviane Sassen was turning to photography after studying fashion. From the start, the Dutch artist envisioned this collection as a book, which she assembled herself using photocopies from a large Xerox printer. It remained a project … until thirty years later when she met the editors of Note Note, who offered to publish it.
Folio brings us back to a photography pivotal period. In the 1990s, the medium shifted toward documenting reality in a spontaneous and natural manner, far from the glossy images of the previous decade. For Viviane Sassen, it was liberating: « In the 1980s, it was all quite glamorous and kind of distant. And then suddenly in the 90s, it became much more with the rise of snapshot photography and the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki or Nan Goldin who treated photography in a very different way : it was just capturing your friends, yourself, your own environment. Something that, as a young poor student, I could relate to. »
Her photographs fall within this aesthetic of instantaneity and intimacy captured in all its rawness. But they also reveal the early presence of the visual language of Viviane Sassen as we know her today, who likes to explore the geometry of images through framing and staging. When she photographs herself or her entourage, what she seeks is a formal potential. Faces are not shown, she is not drawn to individuality but rather looks at the body from all angles. The body becomes a material to be sculpted. She models it into knotted choreographies that she likes to stretch to the bizarre. The tools of these photographic sculptures ? Colour, preferably vivid, contrasts of light and shadow and graphic shapes she draws from her surroundings : a ray of sunlight emphasising the geometry of an armpit or a white towel that turns an image into a collage.
The layout of Folio pays homage to this visual vocabulary. The book is enveloped in a captivating green, which punctuates the rest of its pages. If this colour brings nature to her mind, it also takes Viviane Sassen back to her childhood in South Africa and the hospital where her father worked, wearing a uniform of the same shade. In response to this green, she plays with white — her remedy to melancholy — just as the book’s pages, whose various sizes create white margins that underline the geometry of one image or carve another, echoing that same white towel or that piece of paper held by a claw-like hand and reproduced on the book cover.
“Young, I was back then, and happy to be older now” writes Viviane Sassen in the penultimate letter of the alphabet book that provides an original conclusion to Folio : a retrospective look in 26 entries. Thirty years have passed since these images emerged from her camera, but is there a difference between this body of work and her recent creations ? Not really. Viviane Sassen may not take pictures of herself or her friends anymore, her images may no longer have lost that grainy 1990s look. But her gaze is very much still here, with the same force that enlivened her initial experiments in photography.
Viviane Sassen – Folio
Published by NOTE NOTE ÉDITIONS
80 pages, Edition of 1200 copies
Designed at Studio Mathieu Meyer
Available here and in selected bookshops.
The book will be shown at Polycopies alongside the other publications of Note Note Éditions
